New Edition of Catullus 64 Offers Detailed Insights into Latin Poet’s Tiny Epic

Trinity Tutorial Fellow Gail Trimble has published a major new edition of Catullus' Poem 64, including a comprehensive commentary, which has been released by Cambridge University Press.

Catullus is a central figure in the canon of Latin poetry - famous both for his passionate love poetry and his obscene attacks on his enemies. His longest work, however, is a tiny epic set in the world of Greek mythology which has fascinated and perplexed readers from the first century BC until today.  

Poem 64 begins with the Argonauts, quickly turns into a love story between a hero and a sea-nymph, then abandons the description of their wedding for an apparently unrelated narrative about Ariadne before culminating in a prophetic epithalamium on the Trojan War and a lament for the degeneracy of the human race. Highly wrought, densely allusive, moving and beautiful, it was hugely influential on the next generation of Roman poets, especially Virgil and Ovid, and is widely read by modern classicists.

Dr Trimble's book investigates the poem on every level of detail, combining a line-by-line commentary with longer discussions of sections of the poem, an introduction that sets it in its historical and literary contexts, and an epilogue that offers an overall interpretation. Part of the commentary began as her doctoral thesis, and she worked on the book for over fifteen years, alongside the other commitments involved in being Trinity's Fellow and Tutor in Classics.

Dr Trimble says, 'It is wonderful to see the commentary published at last - and perhaps even better that I can still truthfully say that Catullus 64 is my favourite poem. I feel very fortunate to have had the time and space to explore this text in the way that it deserves. I hope that my edition will help other readers to deepen their understanding and appreciation of Catullus' masterpiece, and also that, like the commentaries I most admire, it will shed light on many other aspects of ancient literature and culture too.'